31–40 of 148 posts
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The snark isn't doing you any favors.
I think the snark is more than sufficiently justified in this case.
The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me. What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publi…
That would assume universities exist to perform logical value in society.
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Could you elaborate on the risks you think they take? To me taking publications that academia produces, getting them reviewed for free by academia, only to host a couple kilobyte file behind a 25$ paywall seems like a pretty risk free strategy. The only risk they take is being so outrageously greedy that people will get fed up at some point and stop working with them anymore.
Being published by Elsevier has some "cachet". Maybe they capitalize on that, I'm not sure. Although I had the possibility of publishing with them I turned it down, only because at the time I was way too busy and already had a deal running with Charles River. But mostly because... way too busy. I guess it depends what you want from a book deal. Any book deals I have been approached for have never been for financial g…
I have never had a problem spending money on educational material that was way beyond what you can find in public libraries (Internet these days).
Not really been following print for a while. I'd like to think they still maintain that standard despite current trends.
Sad if that is not the case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being published by Elsevier has some "cachet". Maybe they capitalize on that, I'm not sure. Although I had the possibility of publishing with them I turned it down, only because at the time I was way too busy and already had a deal running with Charles River. But mostly because... way too busy. I guess it depends what you want from a book deal. Any book deals I have been approached for have never been for financial g…
Maybe they have the cachet of "reasonable competence", but what has cachet are the journals themselves. Books are way less relevant than papers, and their publishers are even less relevant. E.g., nobody cares who publishes Science or Nature.
While I very much abhor the practices of Elsevier, one has to be really careful how one acts to push back. Even without getting into the result that not interacting with Elsevier has on careers in the biomedical sciences, it's easy to fall into traps with other publishing firms. For instance, PlosOne is a pay-to-publish "alternative". However, the motivations here are backwards. PlosOne makes money for each accepted…
The author of the article addresses this concern in the "What you can do" section. He says he's noticed no ill effects from avoiding Elsevier journals and that most people are likely to have the same experience.
As for PLOS ONE's business model, it's possible that it sets up some perverse incentives, but fortunately there are choices other than PLOS ONE if this model bothers you.
If it really is impossible for you to avoid publishing in an Elsevier journal, that's fine, but anybody who can avoid it should for the reasons presented in this article.
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Elsevier is a huge player and owns many important journals. It's still very important where you publish if you want to build a name for yourself...
What does ownership entail other than archiving the content and providing access to it?
The point is not that Elsevier Journals are bad Journals. They aren't. However, Elsevier is a bad publisher, and publishing in these journals enables Elsevier. The author then continues to argue there is actually little personal cost in avoiding Elsevier journals.
What exactly is preventing someone from doing a big switch? Pure coordination problem? Are there a lot of academics who would be against moving over?
It's a collective action problem. Some of most prolific publishers are early career academics who need to make tenure, and tenure committees are looking for easy metrics (like "impact factor"). Choosing to publish in a less prestigious journal because it is better behaved can have real negative consequences if you are in a minority.
Yes, and one that, while I agree it's not easily solvable by academia, should be easily solvable by governments, who fund practically all of the research that gets published in Elsevier's journals (and those of all the other major publishers). So my real question is not why academia hasn't solved this problem (some fields, such as math and physics, basically have, with arxiv.org), but why governments haven't.
- get rejected right away, or
- the manuscript gets distributed to fellow scientists (who reviews for free). The reviews get collected and manuscript rejected, or
- we get a chance to address the reviewer's concern, resubmit and gets rejected, or
- The editor does some proof-reading and publish the paper behide a paywall. I lose all the rights and I may need to ask the journal for permission to use part of it in my thesis, otherwise I risk plagirizing my own writing.
Sometimes when I read preprints in computer science/physics/bioinformatics etc. I feel in those disciplines researchers are a big happy family, and we biologists are locked in a prisoner's dilemma because we can't communicate. Then we fight each other and the publication companies are selling tickets for others to watch.
[0]: http://www.idea.org/blog/2011/04/04/fees-and-other-business-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a collective action problem. Some of most prolific publishers are early career academics who need to make tenure, and tenure committees are looking for easy metrics (like "impact factor"). Choosing to publish in a less prestigious journal because it is better behaved can have real negative consequences if you are in a minority.
> It's a collective action problem. Yes, and one that, while I agree it's not easily solvable by academia, should be easily solvable by governments, who fund practically all of the research that gets published in Elsevier's journals (and those of all the other major publishers). So my real question is not why academia hasn't solved this problem (some fields, such as math and physics, basically have, with arxiv.org),…